Ooh, baby, baby! The joy of Lensbaby.

I paced back and forth, listening closely to the door - expectantly waiting for the latest addition to my Nikon family.  Nervously, I ran to the door when the doorbell rang.  When I saw the Amazon.com box sitting on the porch, I knew it had to be the delivery of my baby - Lensbaby, that is.
The Lensbaby Composer is a neat little bundle-of-joy that looks like a lens on a ball joint - which is exactly what it is.  What is cool about the contraption is that it is modular and has a wide range of accessories to achieve different effects from this interesting tool.  The Lensbaby Composer comes with a double-glass lens insert for sharp focus, but this can easily be exchanged for the single-glass, plastic, or pinhole lens modules.  The 'baby' also comes with an assortment of aperture rings for various degrees of soft-focus effects.

The purpose of this funny looking design is to put more control into the photographer's hands to achieve stunning images by shifting the focal plane to manipulate what appears to be in or out of focus in the image.  Of course you could do the same thing in Photoshop, but it that would be a considerable amount of extra labor.
All puns aside, I took the photos below within minutes of opening the packaging- using it was intuitive although I admit I did pick up a few finer details when I went back and checked out the manufacturer's website.  
Adding this baby to your brood is sure to stimulate your creativity to conceive new images. (Sorry- couldn't help myself!)

Focal "sweet spot" at center of image

The "sweet spot" is toward the top of the image

The unforeseen effects of the transition from 35mm film to digital photography.

God, I'm feeling old today!  I decided to dig into a stash of expired film to do some experimental photography.  I pulled out a Nikon N90s (a sophisticated camera not so many years ago) and loaded it with a roll of 135 color slide film and took off for a walk around Jamaica Plain to look for film-worthy subjects.  Upon returning home, I realized that I would have to research labs with the ability to process the film since you can't just go to CVS anymore.  I praised the Internet and Google for the ability to quickly search for such things, and then I stopped.  What I saw made me feel my own expiration date wasn't so far away either.  I'd shot a roll of Kodachrome 64, which of course I knew was not even made anymore, but I hadn't considered that the processing (K-14) had also become obsolete.  There it was: The death of Kodachrome in 2009 and following shortly thereafter, the last roll had been processed on December 30, 2010 at a lone-wolf lab- the last K-14 processor in the world - in Kansas.  My hopes had been dashed as I searched for an alternative to the Kodachrome processing technology when I read blog after blog lamenting the disappearance of Kodachrome and the proprietary chemistry that produced the rich colors photographers had come to expect from Kodachrome 64.  You can process it for black and white images, but what's the point?  That's not what the film was designed for, nor what it was considered to be the best at.
Feeling tired, creaky, and kind of cranky, I reloaded the camera with T-MAX 400- the standard for black and white film.   At least THAT I can process myself it's necessary.

Perhaps it's fitting that one of the last photographs I took with Kodachrome 64 is of a sunset.  This photo was taken on Captiva Island in Florida sometime around 1993.  I think it was taken with an N8008 but my memory, like the camera, was stolen from me some time ago.